They note that the nation’s demographic changes, consumption potential and reform plans will open up plenty of opportunities to make money this year. So which sectors should investors watch? Read More »

It’s rare for Chinese citizens to laugh outwardly at their president. But when Xi Jinping appeared to scold his New Zealand counterpart over food safety during a face-to-face meeting in Bali on Sunday, the irony proved too delicious to ignore.

Associated Press

During a short get-together ahead of this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, Mr. Xi reminded New Zealand Prime Minister John Key that food safety mattered to people’s health, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Xinhua said Mr. Xi “urged New Zealand to take tough measures to ensure food quality and thus maintain the sound momentum of economic and trade cooperation between the two countries.”

Chinese social media users, inundated on a monthly basis with reports of domestic food scandals, responded with a collective face-palm. Read More »

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key plans to visit China to apologize to parents for an infant formula scare caused by the country’s dairy giant Fonterra Cooperative Group.

Mr. Key said that the New Zealand government would announce next week its own inquiry into how three batches of whey protein concentrate came to be contaminated and exported. Once he has some answers, Mr. Key said, he would be traveling to China. Read More »

Hong Kong is a city festooned with wall-to-wall milk-formula ads, with demand so high that the government recently had to slap a quota on purchases to keep from running out.

But behind the formula frenzy, official statistics show, the number of women breastfeeding their children is also quietly on the rise as the city tries everything from comic books to proposing a new voluntary code regulating milk-formula advertisements to encourage mothers to breastfeed. Read More »

The antitrust bureau of China’s National Development and Reform Commission has launched an investigation of three major foreign baby-formula brands—Mead Johnson Nutrition, Danone, and Nestlé—for price fixing.

The NDRC is citing Article 14 of the Anti-Monopoly Law as grounds for the investigation, suggesting that it sees the three companies, the largest foreign makers of milk powder by market share, of abusing their commanding market position to set unfairly high prices. The law has been used to go after companies for setting high prices before; in early January Samsung, LG, and a number of Taiwanese television makers were fined $22 million and ordered to pay consumers $27 million for fixing prices of flat-panel TVs.

But are price fixing and unfair competition the real issue? There are three key issues that the government needs to go after. Read More »

China’s scandal-tainted dairy industry took another step toward consolidation on Wednesday when its largest milk producer raised bought a bigger stake in the country’s biggest dairy farming company.

Milk producer China Mengniu Dairy Co., involved in a 2008 melamine scandal, said it had increased its stake in China Modern Dairy Holdings Ltd. from 1% to 28%. It did so to “secure both quality and quantity of raw milk sources,” Mengniu Chief Executive Sun Yiping said. Read More »

Got milk formula? If you can’t find any in your local supermarket, Hong Kong’s government is telling parents, ‘just give us a call.’

Over the weekend, the government began manning a temporary 24-hour hotline helping parents order milk formula, which has nearly disappeared off shelves in some areas thanks to the crush of mainland Chinese shoppers preparing for Chinese Lunar New Year. In its first two days of operation, it received more than 3,800 calls, Secretary for Food and Health Ko Wing-Man said Sunday. Read More »

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